Free The Golden Horseshoe and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett Page B

but didn’t. My wife tried to reach him by phone a couple times today, but couldn’t.”
    VIII
    The next morning I called Pangburn’s apartment before I got out of bed, and got no answer. Then I telephoned Axford and made an appointment for ten o’clock at his office.
    â€œI don’t know what he’s up to now,” Axford said good-naturedly when I told him that Pangburn had apparently been away from his apartment since Sunday, “and I suppose there’s small chance of guessing. Our Burke is nothing if not erratic. How are you progressing with your search for the damsel in distress?”
    â€œFar enough to convince me that she isn’t in a whole lot of distress. She got twenty thousand dollars from your brother-in-law the day before she vanished.”
    â€œTwenty thousand dollars from Burke? She must be a wonderful girl! But wherever did he get that much money?”
    â€œFrom you.”
    Axford’s muscular body straightened in his chair.
    â€œFrom me?”
    â€œYes—your check.”
    â€œHe did not.”
    There was nothing argumentative in his voice; it simply stated a fact.
    â€œYou didn’t give him a check for twenty thousand dollars on the first of the month?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThen,” I suggested, “perhaps we’d better take a run over to the Golden Gate Trust Company.”
    Ten minutes later we were in Clement’s office.
    â€œI’d like to see my cancelled checks,” Axford told the cashier.
    The youth with the polished yellow hair brought them in presently—a thick wad of them—and Axford ran rapidly through them until he found the one he wanted. He studied that one for a long while, and when he looked up at me he shook his head slowly but with finality.
    â€œI’ve never seen it before.”
    Clement mopped his head with a white handkerchief, and tried to pretend that he wasn’t burning up with curiosity and fears that his bank had been gypped.
    The millionaire turned the check over and looked at the endorsement.
    â€œDeposited by Burke,” he said in the voice of one who talks while he thinks of something entirely different, “on the first.”
    â€œCould we talk to the teller who took in the twenty-thousand-dollar check that Miss Delano deposited?” I asked Clement.
    He pressed one of his desk’s pearl buttons with a fumbling pink finger, and in a minute or two a little sallow man with a hairless head came in.
    â€œDo you remember taking a check for twenty thousand from Miss Jeanne Delano a few weeks ago?” I asked him.
    â€œYes, sir! Yes, sir! Perfectly.”
    â€œJust what do you remember about it?”
    â€œWell, sir, Miss Delano came to my window with Mr. Burke Pangburn. It was his check. I thought it was a large check for him to be drawing, but the bookkeepers said he had enough money in his account to cover it. They stood there—Miss Delano and Mr. Pangburn—talking and laughing while I entered the deposit in her book, and then they left, and that was all.”
    â€œThis check,” Axford said slowly, after the teller had gone back to his cage, “is a forgery. But I shall make it good, of course. That ends the matter, Mr. Clement, and there must be no more to-do about it.”
    â€œCertainly, Mr. Axford. Certainly.”
    Clement was all enormously relieved smiles and head-noddings, with this twenty-thousand-dollar load lifted from his bank’s shoulders.
    Axford and I left the bank then and got into his coupé, in which we had come from his office. But he did not immediately start the engine. He sat for a while staring at the traffic of Montgomery Street with unseeing eyes.
    â€œI want you to find Burke,” he said presently, and there was no emotion of any sort in his bass voice. “I want you to find him without risking the least whisper of scandal. If my wife knew of all this— She mustn’t know. She thinks her